picture of the
moment's passage

''Twixt the dying atheist's negative,
And God's face waiting after all'--

round the corner with a flail, belike. Religion cannot be more
dishonoured than by the moral ideals of some of its champions.

Sec. 4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE

But we have now clearly imported into the rationalist philosophy a
principle or factor which ostensibly rivals or primes reason. The
rationalist avows a moral bias--an attitude towards his fellows, a moral
'taste,' let us say--which partly determines his reasoned judgment. He
has a conception of goodness in virtue of which he finds 'revelation'
frequently repellent and the popular 'God' a chimera; even as the
believer finds them satisfactory because they are in part conformable to
his moral and speculative bias, and he has been brought up to pretermit
judgment beyond those limits. This bias appears to be partly congenital,
partly acquired; though most men are agreed that many who reveal a given
bias would have presented another had they been differently trained.
Certain forms of congenital bias, that is to say, yield more or less
easily to others, specially fostered or exercised. Whatever be the
respective force of the generative factors, the fact of bias remains;
and there is no escape from the conclusion that it operates in regard to
'intellectual' as well as to 'moral' judgments--to judgments, that is,
of causal interpretation or non-moral discrimination as well as to
judgments upon human action.

The rationalist, in fact, is merely a person who in certain directions
carries the processes of doubt, analysis, and judgment further than do
persons of a different habit of mind. His neighbour, who believes in
'God' or 'the saints' or Mrs. Eddy, may chance to carry those processes
in other directions further than he,--may be more reflective and
experimental and judicious, for instance, in matters of diet,--may even
be an analytical thinker in matters of science to which the so-called
rationalist has given no independent thought. There are well-known
instances of men of science who by analysis widen the bounds of physical
knowledge while accepting, in ways which other men find grotesquely
uncritical, loose propositions on psychic existence. When sounds are
heard from furniture, the rationalist, with his naturalistic bias, looks
for explanations in terms of physics; while the spiritualist, even if he
chance to be a professed phys